{"id":43,"date":"2005-04-26T05:06:27","date_gmt":"2005-04-26T05:06:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/?p=43"},"modified":"2011-07-29T16:02:01","modified_gmt":"2011-07-29T16:02:01","slug":"the-death-of-yvonne-vera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/?p=43","title":{"rendered":"The Death of Yvonne Vera"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nOne of the great discoveries for me last year when I taught a course on 20th Century world literature in English was the work of Yvonne Vera from Zimbabwe. I taught her novel <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0374528160\/qid=1114504872\/sr=2-2\/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2\/102-6418459-0564104\">Under the Tongue<\/a>, which is a powerful and unforgettable book about one girl&#8217;s attempt to find herself in the face of incest, war, and the complex workings of society and family. The book won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1997 and Vera quickly became one of the rising stars in African literature.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nSadly, <a href=\"http:\/\/allafrica.com\/stories\/200504251203.html\">Vera died a few weeks ago in Toronto<\/a> after an extended battle with meningitis. She was only 38. She had lived in Canada on and off for the past number of years, having done her PhD at York University and then teaching there before returning to Zimbabwe to become quite quickly the country&#8217;s best known young writer and the Director of the National Gallery in Bulawayo. Later, after being struck with meningitis, she returned to Toronto to battle through her illness and to work on her sixth book.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nVera&#8217;s death is a great, great loss to the world of literature and to the people of Zimbabwe. Fortunately we can remember her through the remarkably rich body of work she left behind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the great discoveries for me last year when I taught a course on 20th Century world literature in English was the work of Yvonne Vera from Zimbabwe. I taught her novel Under the Tongue, which is a powerful and unforgettable book about one girl&#8217;s attempt to find herself in the face of incest, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-worldlit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}